AI Through a Jewish Lens

A conference on the intersection between AI-powered tools and Jewish thought.

At a time when AI is rapidly reshaping the world, join Congregation Emanu-El for a three-part conference exploring how AI intersects with Jewish spirituality, ethics, and everyday life. Through sessions on AI and Jewish Ethics, AI and Medicine, and AI and Online Misinformation, we will discover how Jewish wisdom and tradition can inform our understanding of emerging technologies.

Session One

On January 12, we will open our conference with a deep dive into AI and Jewish ethics. Can a tradition that has wrestled with new technologies for thousands of years, from the printing press to the electric light, help guide us through this? What happens to Torah study when your chavruta (study partner) is a machine? And what do the people building AI owe humanity? We welcome Rabbi Geoffrey Mitelman and DZ Kalman of Sinai and Synapses in conversation with Noah Zweben, a Claude Code Product Manager at Anthropic.

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Session Two

On January 19, we will explore AI and medicine and dig into questions around personalized medicine, biotechnology, immunology, and genetics. From customized cancer treatments to new vaccines and miraculous medicine matches for rare diseases that have never been explored, the impact AI is already having in medicine is unprecedented. Could treatments one day be designed for you specifically, rather than for the “average patient”? As AI learns from our health data, who should we trust with it? Our panel of experts will include Professor Shai Shen-Orr, a professor in the Ruth and Bruce Rappaport Faculty of Medicine at the Technion. Prof. Shen-Orr heads the Technion’s Laboratory of Systems Immunology & Precision Medicine and serves as Director of the Technion’s Healthy Aging Institute and the Zimin Institute for AI Solutions in Healthcare.

In partnership with the American Technion Society.

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Session Three

On January 26, we close our conference with a conversation on AI and online misinformation, focusing on Holocaust distortion and antisemitism, in partnership with the Anti-Defamation League (ADL). Fabricated AI “photos” of the Holocaust now spread widely on social media. Earlier this year, dozens of German memorial sites issued an open letter warning that this content is blurring the line between history and fiction. What does the research tell us about how widespread it is? How is it shaping what younger generations believe about the past? And where can Holocaust education make a difference? We will be joined by Ariel Behrman, Vice President of Education at ADL, and Morgan Clark, Associate Director of Research, Advocacy and Policy at ADL’s Center for Technology and Society and Center on Extremism. The conversation will be moderated by Dr. Anita Friedman of Jewish Family and Children’s Services.

This conference is generously sponsored by the Rabbi Leo Trepp Lecture Fund. This fund was created by his wife Gunda Trepp to honor Rabbi Trepp's (z”l) legacy as an intellectual thought leader, pioneering educator, and mensch.